Lifeboat Foundation

For the first time in my timezone, SpaceX completed 9 launches in a month. Previously, if you were based in Europe, you saw 9 launches in a month a few months ago. At 9 launches/month that is a current rate of 108 launches/year, making SpaceX’s goal of 100 launches this year a possibility.

They had a lot of trouble getting this flight off today as a recent hurricane is still affecting the weather some. They got around this by having a 5 and a half hour launch window so they just waited a few hours until the weather was clear for several minutes and they launched!

Continue reading “SpaceX Falcon 9 Launches Starlink 6-13 Mission” »

Digital sociology explores the interplay between digital technology, social behaviors, and societal structures. As an emerging discipline, it delves into how online interactions, social media platforms, and digital tools shape and reflect cultural dynamics, personal identities, and group norms. Digital sociologists analyze trends in cyber communities, the implications of digital data collection, and the broader impact of the internet on social evolution.

In this age of rapid technological advancement — where we find ourselves in the midst of a Digital Revolution and most recently, in an AI Revolution, the fast-spinning changes in society require analysis and understanding. Digital sociology provides critical insights into the multifaceted relationship between technology and the fabric of society.

Experts warn that AI-generated content may pose a threat to the AI technology that produced it.

In a recent paper on how generative AI tools like ChatGPT are trained, a team of AI researchers from schools like the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge found that the large language models behind the technology may potentially be trained on other AI-generated content as it continues to spread in droves across the internet — a phenomenon they coined as “model collapse.” In turn, the researchers claim that generative AI tools may respond to user queries with lower-quality outputs, as their models become more widely trained on “synthetic data” instead of the human-made content that make their responses unique.

Other AI researchers have coined their own terms to describe the training method. In a paper released in July, researchers from Stanford and Rice universities called this phenomenon the “Model Autography Disorder,” in which the “self-consuming” loop of AI training itself on content generated by other AI could result in generative AI tools “doomed” to have their “quality” and “diversity” of images and text generated falter. Jathan Sadowski, a senior fellow at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab in Australia who researches AI, called this phenomenon “Habsburg AI,” arguing that AI systems heavily trained on outputs of other generative AI tools can create “inbred mutant” responses that contain “exaggerated, grotesque features.”

#ted.
#wifi.
#internet.

Continue reading “LiFi — This is the Fastest Internet in the World (224GBPS) — Easiest Explanation Ever!” »

If your mother says she loves you: check it.

A couple weeks ago, I asked Vergecast.

What I was not expecting was for so many people to send me versions of a video that shows a banana getting stitches in a robotic surgery device, with the captions claiming that the surgery is being done remotely over 5G. This video has had an … More.

Continue reading “No, they did not do surgery on a banana over 5G” »

NotebookLM is a neat research tool with some big ideas. It’s still rough and new, but it feels like Google is onto something.

What if you could have a conversation with your notes? That question has consumed a corner of the internet recently.

Google’s version of this is called NotebookLM. It’s an AI-powered research tool that is meant to help you organize and interact with your own notes. (Google originally announced it earlier this year as Project Tailwind but quickly changed the name.) Right now, it’s really just a… More.

Continue reading “Google’s AI-powered note-taking app is the messy beginning of something great” »

Metasurfaces, artificially engineered surfaces that can manipulate electromagnetic signals in unique ways, have huge potential for several technological applications, including the implementation of sixth generation (6G) cellular communications. The limitations and vulnerabilities of these smart surfaces, however, are still poorly understood.

Researchers at Peking University, University of Sannio and Southeast University recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding the vulnerability of metasurfaces to wireless cyber-attacks. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, outlines two types of attacks that should be considered and accounted for before metasurfaces can be deployed on a large-scale.

“This work was primarily driven by the need for enhancing security and privacy of wireless communications in the upcoming 6G era, characterized by unprecedented speeds, ultra-low latency, and vast connection nodes,” Lianlin Li, Vincenzo Galdi and Tie Jun Cui, three of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore.

The dead internet theory and the rise of bots in an AI-dominated world.

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced fine-tuning for GPT-3.5 Turbo—the AI model that powers the free version of ChatGPT—through its API. It allows training the model with custom data, such as company documents or project documentation. OpenAI claims that a fine-tuned model can perform as well as GPT-4 with lower cost in certain scenarios.

So basically, fine-tuning teaches GPT-3.5 Turbo about custom content, such as project documentation or any other written reference. That can come in handy if you want to build an AI assistant based on GPT-3.5 that is intimately familiar with your product or service but lacks knowledge of it in its training data (which, as a reminder, was scraped off the web before September 2021).